Earlier this year I was out walking our little dog with my six year old. We were walking by a certain house when I hear the distinctive sound of two BIG dogs barking. Looking at the house, I saw to my horror two large dogs come snarling from the backyard through the open gate- right at us.
I had a split second. I knew two things, the dogs were after my little dog, and my daughter would absolutely try to protect him - and get hurt doing it. So, I did what any mom would do, I yanked on the leash hard enough to jerk the dog into the air, grabbed him and stepped in front of my daughter. I squared my feet and whenthe brindle dog leaped at my dog in my arms, I raised my forearm, which he promptly bit. His teeth slid off my arm a second later - probably when he realized that he bit a person instead of another dog, but he still left two punctures, a threeinch long gaping wound and one heck of a big pressure bruise.
I yelled “Ouch!” I am not that tough and wanted to yell more, but my girl was right there and was already freaked enough. I kept telling her " Mommy’s fine , she just has an owie." Turning, I calmly asked for the owners to get the proof of rabies vaccine.
In retrospect, that was pretty badass of me (although it didn’t feel like that at the time).
As I said: nothing compares to the badassness of a mother. Moms are a force to be reckoned with.
Also, is it just a mom instinct to get your baby behind you when confronting danger? My mom still does it sometimes even though I’m a grown married man.
Definitely. This reminded me of one about my mom, who is the very definition of bad ass- she rides motorcycles, flies planes, etc. When she was a wayward youth hitch hiking across the country, she was picked up by some guys in a van. She thought it was safe because there were a mess of other hitch hikers in the van, too, so she fell asleep. She woke up a few hours later, the only one in the van and faced with two guys who were eying her quite hungrily. So she picked up a beer bottle, broke it across the dashboard and held it up to the driver’s throat and demanded to be let out. They were so freaked that they pulled over immediately.
Once, I looked in a mirror.
The chick was bad ass. Your friend just got his ass kicked by a girl, which is never badass.
One of the most badass thing I can remember was one time back when I was in college. A few of my fraternity buddies and I are basically sitting on a couch in front of our house smoking joints and whatnot. All of a sudden this motorcycle comes tear-assing past us chased by a couple of police cars. I’m not sure what happened exactly. But we basically watched this guy turn out his lights, hide until the cops sped past him, and then backtrack the way he came. It just seemed really badass from where we were sitting.
I watched an entire country rise up against an oppressor. It was Latvia in January of 1991. The country was not yet independent of Soviet occupation, but after over 50 years of it, it had had enough. Countless people converged on Riga, the capital, from every corner of the country, to challenge the “Black Berets”, the elite special unit of the Soviet occupational forces. The people set up barricades of lumber and barbed wire, as well as heavy machinery, and lit bonfires around which they stood singing and awaiting any conflict that would come their way. Men were shot by snipers, and a little girl was run over by a tank (in Lithuania). That same year, the country gained its independence. Can’t really describe it in a paragraph, but dang, that was pretty badass if you ask me.
I have led an interesting life and could sit down and think of a couple dozen moments. Working in EMS, badass moments are something you come across monthly, other parts of my life had them as well.
A firefighter diving into a rain swollen canal after a kid, hitting the water almost before the hiss of the air brakes on his truck faded.
Seeing a cop drop a bad guy twice his size and make it look easy.
Dragging a guy onto a backboard during a motocross race with motorcycles flying 4-5 feet over the top of you.
Seeing a 45 mph t-bone collision from 20 feet away.
Seeing 4 guys with baseball bats back down 12 pretty hard ass looking gangsters.
Catching a piece of work that flew off a lathe in my bare hands.
Telling a probably 12 year old kid with a very real gun pointed at me to “just fucking shoot me if you have the balls”
My story is kind of lame…such great stories in here!
My brother was hanging out at our aunt’s restaurant, in a not-so-nice part of downtown, when his car was stolen out of the parking lot.
My cousin, who is a 500-lb city boy, took my brother around in his car, looking for my brother’s stolen car. They found it, and stole it right back.
I saw a donkey bite a kid.
This reminds me: Mr. S likes to kill wasps and hornets by “flicking” them with his middle finger.
I think you just won the thread. Now that is something I’d have loved to see firsthand - I was in college during Georgia’s Rose Revolution, and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, and was seriously bummed that I couldn’t see them in person.
It was in the summer of 1994. I was 7 years old. Some backstory - my dad was my mother’s second husband - she’d re-married him after her first husband, who was very old, died several years before I was born. My mother had already had a son with her previous husband - my half-brother, who was 15. He never really got along with my father, who was sort of a roguish character who really married my mom more for money and social status than anything else.
My half-brother resented my father’s blatantly preferential treatment of me (his biological son) and the fact that my dad was at that time carrying on a few not-so-discreet affairs and wasting a lot of my mother’s money, and in the years following my mother’s re-marriage, there was constant strife between them. Their relationship was always a simmering cauldron of barely-suppressed hatred.
So one day, when I was 7, my older half-brother decided to finally take a stand. There was a music recital that day. My mother was playing the harpsichord with a small chamber group and my dad was in the audience watching her - a large audience of friends and family, from my parents’ upper-class social circle (which my father just barely stayed afloat in.)
My half-brother barged right into the recital, walked straight up to my mother, stopped the performance, and gave a scathing speech denouncing my dad - in front of the whole crowd, who sat there, silent and astonished, taking it all in. He called my father a ruffian, a scoundrel, a swindler and cheater who was insulting my mother and her honor by engaging in open infidelities and frittering away her family’s money. When he was done with his speech, the whole room was silent for a few seconds, amazed at the nerve of the kid.
Then - in one swift, savage motion - my father rose from his chair, stepped forward, and punched my half-brother in the kidney, and then continued battering him with his fists. They both fell to the ground and my dad was on top of him, swinging away, punching him in the stomach, the face, everywhere - just beating the everloving shit out of him. People from the crowd started to rush them and tried to pull them apart, but my dad shook them off and continued his brutal assault on my half-brother, attacking him with a frenzy I had never seen from anyone before or since. He was beaten so badly, he left home and didn’t come back for another decade or so.
It was truly the most badass beating I have ever seen anyone dole out. And from my own dad, no less.
My father was not a violent man. And I hesitate to tell this story because it makes him seem so.
I should say this was the only time I ever saw my dad hit another man.
I was … less than 10, because we had not moved. He and I were at a shopping center near our house, and I didn’t really follow everything that led up to the incident, but I believe it was a man who had hit his wife and my dad stepped up to try and stop him. The man, who was quite a bit taller than my dad, shoved my dad back and said something which I didn’t understand at the time but do now. (I thought he was saying his wife’s name, Puta. I now know that puta is a Spanish word meaning “whore.”) After the man shoved my dad, my dad stepped back towards him and punched him in the side of throat. The man fell on his knees as started holding his throat and gasping. And this is the part I remember very clearly: my dad stepped up to him and said quietly, “As soon as you can talk, apologize to the lady.”
Sounds like Hamlet and Jerry Springer, Argent. I think the 15-year-old was the badass.
whoosh
Can’t speak for all moms, but there is nothing I wouldn’t square off against for my child, so yes, it wouldn’t matter if she was bigger than me, my baby is going behind me.
Here’s mine:
For a few years I was a helicopter gunner for the Air Force. I’ve been to Iraq a couple of times. During my last trip after takeoff one night I test-fired my machine gun (.50 cal). It didn’t work. Now, I knew that weapon, it was my baby. I could take it apart and put it back together without thinking, so I knew exactly what was wrong with it.
Very simple fix: the ammo fell out and I had to reseat it. In order to do so I had to lift the cover plate and put it back, easy. What sucked though is we were going ~140 knots and the wind caught the cover plate, my hand slipped, and it slammed right into my left hand, which was working the ammo. It hurt. It hurt like a mother. It hurt like 8 bitches in a bitch boat.
I whimpered, I swore, then I regained my composer after a couple of seconds, because being over Baghdad with a weapon that won’t fire isn’t something fun. I go to fix the weapon, being a bit more careful this time when I come to find out I couldn’t feel my left hand. I banged it on the aircraft a bit. Nothing.
“Goddamnit.”
But I still had to fix the damn thing, so I did with one hand. Remember, I fucked up fixing it with both my hands, so imagine how hard it was with just one.
I finally get it fixed and test fired. Luckily my right hand was operable, but it still sucked. We land a bit later and over the radio, after things got quiet, “Pilot, gunner.”
Pilot: “Go ahead.”
Me: “Yeah, I…um, I think I broke my finger.”
Pilot: “Really?”
Me: “Yeah. It’s all black and blue and shit. And I can’t feel my hand.”
Pilot: “Can you fly back?”
Me: " I think so. It’s going to suck."
Pilot: “Yeah. I was wondering why it took you so long.”
So I flew it back and two days later I was able to go get an x-ray. A simple, non-displaced fracture on the second phalanx of the left hand. I still can’t make a full fist and it still hurts when it’s cold.
Good times, good times.
I pick this for my superpower.
Cape Canaveral AFS. Pershing explodes shortly after liftoff. Debris falls everywhere, but must be recovered to determine the cause of the failure. Some debris is in a shallow pond between the launch pad and the beach.
Teams of Navy divers spend several days - and nights - diving in the pond, recovering debris, working 2-3 divers at a time. At least 6 adult alligators occupy this pond; shining lights at night reveals their watchful eyes, all around the pond. Every one, every diver, knows this. There’s one Security Policeman standing guard, in a canoe, with a shotgun; this will likely be useless in case of an attack. Every diver knows this. Every diver continues to work, day and night.
Wow. A fight in which both participants deserved to get their asses kicked by each other.